Jihad vs. McWorld is an analysis of the fundamental conflict of our times: consumerist capitalism versus religious and tribal fundamentalism. Jihad vs. McWorld offers a lens through which to understand the chaotic events of the post-Cold War world. Benjamin R. Barber argues that if you look only at the business section of the daily newspaper, you would be convinced that the world was increasingly united, that borders were increasingly porous, that corporate mergers were steadily knitting the globe into a single international market. But if you focus only on the front page, you would be convinced of just the opposite: that the world was increasingly riven by fratricide, civil war, and the breakup of nations.

Barber provides a single map that unites these two sides of the same coin, and convincingly demonstrates that what capitalism and fundamentalism have in common is a distaste for democracy. For both, in different ways, lay siege to the nation-state itself - heretofore the only guarantor of conditions that have permitted democracy to flourish. Democracy, Barber suggests, may well fall victim to a twin-pronged attack: by a global capitalism run rampant whose essential driving force is nihilistic, at its root destructive of traditional values as it seeks to maximize profit-taking at virtually any moral or religious or spiritual cost; and by religious, tribal, and ethnic fanatics whose various creeds are stamped by intolerance and a rage against the "other."

The paradox at the core of this bold book is that the tendencies of both Jihad and McWorld are at work, both visible sometimes in the same country at the same instant. Jihad pursues a bloody politics of identity, while McWorld seeks a bloodless economics of profit. Belonging by default to McWorld, everyone is compelled to enroll in Jihad. But no one is any longer a citizen. And, asks Barber, without citizens, how can there be democracy?